All aBOARD Expo Setup Day: Tom in the Philippines Day 2

0:08 Hey everybody, I'm Tom Vasel. Welcome to the Philippines here as I continue my trip here to the All Aboard convention. Here in the heart of the Philippines. So, I did a video already where I talked about basically me traveling here in the first day where I went around and looked. Today we're going to go see some stores here. We're going to go see the convention center before it's set up. And I'm sure along the way we're going to eat some food and whatever else. When I say we, I mean me mostly, but let's get going. I'm going to try each morning I want to you know, when I am at a convention you tend to eat a lot. So, take a walk each morning and kind of see what I can see. These high-rises, can you imagine living in the top of one of these?

0:54 But it's pretty warm right now. I want to say it's in the low 80s. I'm not dying yet or anything, but there's a bunch of stuff going on. But otherwise um yeah. It's a beautiful day. So, I get this walk in and then we'll get going. There definitely is a lot of cats all over this city. That's for sure. I must have seen 20 on my walk already. All right, so we're meeting here in the lobby. Look, it's Rob Daviau. It's Colby Dauch. It's all kinds of those people from all different companies. We're going to be going out and looking at some board game stores. Um so, it's it's a scorcher out there, but we're getting ready to go.

1:40 So, now we're loading up in taxi after taxi. One taxi at a time taking a fleet of taxis. That's going to be interesting. All right, we're in the taxi. I'm with Hans. Now, Hans he's running the whole show, right?

1:51 Yes.

1:53 So, we have to be the last taxi to go. But this means I'll go to the right spot. So, where are we heading for?

1:58 Uh we're going to the oldest business district in the Philippines, Makati City. Um this is also where we have our first store, uh Gaming Library store. Uh we're going to see uh we're going to see the mall that has a church inside of it.

2:12 Oh, wow.

2:13 So so that's one thing. And uh this is also the one of the premium lifestyle malls in the Philippines. So, hopefully everyone really likes it, get some good coffee along the way, and enjoy the day.

2:24 All right. Well, we made it to the first stop. Tall trees. Wow. I wish I could This is not a you know, 4D camera, but if you could feel the heat right now, it is hot. I don't know what's going on here, but I think Cyclops is fighting Robocop. Huh. Oops, they're leaving me behind. This is a nice little area here. We have giant buildings in the background, a park. This looks like the setting of a movie about to go wrong. And a bunch of people over here getting their coffee because addiction. But uh yeah, it's nice. Still pretty hot though. So glad I wore long sleeves. Hey, it's a koi pond. Oops.

3:10 Ah, they left me behind again. All righty. Oh. All right, I won't. All right, we're on the I think the fourth floor. No, the third floor of the mall. So, there's Timezone. There's Toys "R" Us. I'm a Toys "R" Us kid. But I bet you their games aren't so great. But I think we're here to see another game store that's in the mall. And here it is. It's called the Gaming Library. Small little place, but with some pretty Ooh, I see some cool games in there. It's the Omni Board X advertised there. Sweet. Let's check it out.

3:57 So, they have a bunch of Gigamic two-players and then a bunch of puzzle games here. Grizzly Gears, that looks fun. Huh, very interesting. More to come. Over here we see some giant games. Look at those ones in the bottom, some big style games down there. Some starters and then up at the top, some pretty popular games. This is a pretty a pretty big deal here. There's a lot of Eldritch Horror. I you know, this game I thought was quite out of print, but obviously still popular here. Ashes, which is which is good cuz it it fills light enough that the owner of Ashes so it's a good thing that his game is on the shelf, makes him happy. Bullet Heart There's this this game.

4:45 Wow, there's a lot of really cool stuff here. This is a pretty neat store here. Pretty small. Some good stuff. And over here we have your typical games, all sorts of things. Obviously King of Tokyo and Splendor, Gloomhaven, see Unlock. I haven't messed with these yet. Here we have the single unlocks.

5:07 Those look cool, bunch of Azul's. And then party games. That's lots of party games. 7 Dr. Eureka I like that. Some pretty good stuff here. Lots of Unmatched on the bottom. Then over here, small games. We have Blink. Deckscape Organ Attack That one I don't know anything about. About organ harvesting. I'm sure it's quality. Dead Cells. Wow, there's a lot There's Gloomhaven by the front door.

5:49 so we can do different campaigns because we noticed that the people who frequent this store if it looks the same on the outside, they won't even come in. So so all of this we we keep changing except that the match over there.

6:08 That's the library.

6:10 Stars and Stripes and Next year. And then we also do a lot of tournaments. So Saturdays are where we host the most of the tournaments here. We do different things. We also did a big league towards the expo. So for all of the tournaments that this

6:30 And here's more of the library. You can see the different games that are there. A lot of party games. Hans was telling us how they take 10 games out every month, put 10 new games in, even a popular game, which forces people if they come to play, let's say they like playing Sushi Go Party, and it's not here, then they're forced to play another one. Otherwise, they'll play the same game all the time and get bored. So this is the gaming area and it's connected to the game store. So just remember, if you're ever in the Philippines at this mall, don't go there, go here. So check it out. What a great little gaming store. And now we're going to see another one. And ah, they're leaving me behind again. Come on, guys.

7:14 This parking

7:15 This is the first mall I've been to that has a church in it. There's some people going now. That's a nice day other than it being brutally hot. Oh, everyone left me again. So now we're at the second mall here, which is much more crowded than the last mall. Of course, it is close to 1:00 here in the afternoon. We got to go up to the fifth level to check out the store. So, onward we go. All right, we made it to the top level here. And over here is What is that? I don't know what that space and time cube is. Looks cool, but here is the other store, the All Board XP by Gaming Library. So, you can see it looks very similar to the last store we were in.

8:01 And you can see people are playing games here in the store. And yeah, the shelves look very similar. Obviously, it's owned by the same people. So, cool. Mhm. You should get this game. It's great. Ooh, I didn't know it was going to dark now. That's new. Found another mass market store, and this one has some actual decent games in it. Look at Sushi Go. That sound game, Harmony. The LEGO game. And Dixit, but don't worry. You thought it was all good. There's still Monopoly. And Hungry Hungry Hippos.

8:43 Well, some good is good. Oh, and I missed the uh other basic games. Look at these. Oh, Magic and Ludo. Yes! I found it! Hooray! Well, it's kind of what I've always dreamed of. Okay, now we're going to lunch at Mr. Jeepney, which is a very popular form of uh transportation. There's one right here. Jeepney. You jump in and on, and we're going to eat. They tell me I'm supposed to use my hands for this, which I feel like I do for all meals, but we'll find out. All right.

9:33 This is lunch! Lunch! That is phenomenal looking. Yeah, it has something to do with the food hole. I'm not 100% sure what this is called. But it looks good. There was only one egg. Who will get the egg? Look what we've done, the carnage everywhere. But it was very, very delicious. All right, let's go to the exhibition, huh? All right, now we're on the bus heading to the convention center. I'm in the back of the bus. Me and Colby cuz we are the bad kids. All right, here we are at the All Boards Expo 2026.

10:22 The MICE Center. And Monopoly Deal is the the first thing I see here, but we're going to go in right now. It's just set up day. So, there's not going to be a lot going on. Let's go check it out. Okay, so we see here's the registration and the gift shop. The gift shop's going to be an exciting spot to see. And in fact, let's go over and look at that now. Since there's a line over here to get into stuff. So, you can see lots of games. You can see they're setting up a lot of different games. Here's a whole pile here. This is going to look fantastic once it is all set up. There's the new King of Tokyo Godzilla.

11:14 Um this game's called Switch On. I don't even know what that's about. Here's the uh three games that are going to be just from the different versions. I'm very excited about that middle one. The Cascadia one, Modern Art, and Seen Again, which I believe I've eaten that now. So, I have eaten Sinigang. That was last night. All righty. Lots of games here. It's going to be a good show. If not If this was just the only area, I'd be happy, but there is more. Okay, we're now in the main hall, where you can see everything is being set up. Lots of different people checking out games. Lots people Things are setting up. There's a lot of people here getting ready to demo games for sure.

12:07 All righty, I need to learn this game cuz I'm going to be playing it with a lot of people here. Metro Bingo. And KJ's going to teach me, and then she's going to beat me.

12:21 Okay.

12:22 Okay. Look, that's a good score, 71. Oh.

12:27 I got 103.

12:28 Oh. Well, I guess they did beat me. What did I do wrong?

12:34 Okay, you need to try it.

12:35 All righty, in game two, I got 180, but also 180. But hey, look who lost.

12:43 All right, so that's Metro or Streams Metro, Metro Bingo. Check it out. All right, we just played the new game, Sea Divers of Jeju. Um and uh look at this. 143 to 160. So, Nick, I am the king of trash, but that means I cleaned up the trash. But look at these beautiful figures here. A new game from Hisashi Hayashi from Siyan. Here's the stage. Tomorrow, all the events will be from here. This place is going to be packed tomorrow, I'm sure. With a lot of things, but you can see the signs on the ceiling telling you exactly where each of the different sections are. Still lots of setup to be done here.

13:30 We're getting lower on time, but there's still time left. And all these folks right now pretty much practicing games getting ready to teach them. See, here you see the giant Q using Q's board being played. Here's a Switch on game. This game is kind of intriguing me. This is from MTS. And yeah, lots of things. You Bibo. Now I'm playing with the new factions here with the Thornhold Drakes against the Moon Step Wolves, also known as werewolves. I'm playing the designer of the game and uh who was trying to beat me and it he's actually succeeding okay, but I've hurt him enough that I was going to say his guy ran, but he was running up. Man, I hate werewolves.

14:18 I wish you were playing a deck you knew so it was a fair fight.

14:21 Nah, it's always a fair fight. We lost, but we did some damage. We made the werewolf run away, but uh we didn't get we got murdered. So but lots of fun. We'll talk more about these factions in the upcoming weeks. Okay, so we're getting close to the end of the setup day. You can see most things are set up. The library is probably or that is where you go buy games is probably set up. People are getting ready. We're going to head back to the hotel. We're almost done here with day minus one. The convention starts tomorrow. Yep, so here's the games for sale almost done. The last boxes are being opened. People are setting up. Tapple, Harmonize, King of Tokyo.

15:09 Piles of games everywhere. Almost there. Here's all the volunteers taking a picture before they work tomorrow. Isn't all the volunteers, there's a bunch of them. All right, that is it for day two or the last day before the convention. Thanks so much for joining me. Um we'll be back with more coverage of All Aboard Convention in the Philippines when it starts. Until next time though, I'm Tom Vassal. We'll see you all around.

15:49 Hey folks, thanks for watching another one of our videos. If you like our videos, if you like our channel, you would love to game with us at one of our conventions. Check out Dice Tower Cruise, Dice Tower East, and Dice Tower West. Fantastic conventions where we play games with wonderful people, a humongous library, and lots of other events and stuff. Also, don't forget to check out our channel, like and subscribe. I'm Tom Vassal.